Direct estimate of the static length-scale accompanying the glass transition

Glasses are liquids whose viscosity has increased so much that they cannot flow. Accordingly, there have been many attempts to define a static length-scale associated with the dramatic slowing down of supercooled liquid with decreasing temperature. Here we present a simple method to extract the desired length-scale which is highly accessible both for experiments and for numerical simulations. The fundamental new idea is that low lying vibrational frequencies come in two types, those related to elastic response and those determined by plastic instabilities. The minimal observed frequency is determined by one or the other, crossing at a typical length-scale which is growing with the approach of the glass transition. This length-scale characterizes the correlated disorder in the system: on longer length-scales the details of the disorder become irrelevant, dominated by the Debye model of elastic modes. To connect the newly defined length-scale to relaxation dynamics near the glass transition, we show that supercooled liquids in which there exist random pinning sites of density rho(im) similar to 1/xi(d)(s) exhibit complete jamming of all dynamics. This is a direct demonstration that the proposed length scale is indeed the static length that was long sought-after. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.